Art & Writing

Posts Tagged alchemy

Found this scrap in an old black notebook—don’t think I’ve posted it anywhere before. Might just come into the story later.

On my third week studying body-modification formulas, I knew I was getting close to my second breakthrough. The first one was a warmup, really; just a basic modification of a regeneration potion to grow extra body parts. It takes a couple days to get used to an extra pair of arms, but once you do get the hang of it, working in the lab is so much easier.

I made a couple of other, intimate, changes as well, which I figured Toby would like. But this second project was for Toby himself.

I wanted to ask him to live with me.

But he’s human.

Humans don’t live in this world.

Traditional transformation formulas are kind of random. You can reliably change, say, into a fox, but it won’t be any fox in particular: fur and eye color, height and weight all may vary. Normally this is a feature—several people can use the same potion and not look like a clone army—but I wanted to make Toby an identity for this world, without taking umpteen different shapechanging drinks, which wouldn’t be healthy anyway.